Abstract/Summary

This is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to the present day. It includes studies of poetic hardship, religious poetry and redeeming debts, the South Sea Bubble and the economic revolution in poetry, debates between metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the modernist's struggle with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the groundlessness of exchange value. It includes close readings of many poems directly or indirectly engaged with money and proposes ways in which, while we cannot escape from monetary economies, we may avoid, to some extent, being ensnared and diminished by them.